Katherine Dettwyler, Ph.D.

Pathways Contributor

Dr. Katherine A. Dettwyler is now a semi-retired Adjunct Professor of Anthropology at Texas A&M University, where she taught from 1987 to 2000. She is the author of Dancing Skeletons: Life and Death in West Africa, which recounts tales of her fieldwork on child health in Mali. Dancing Skeletons was awarded the 1995 Margaret Mead Award from the American Anthropological Association and the Society for Applied Anthropology. She is also the co-editor of Breastfeeding: Biocultural Perspectives, which includes her own two chapters “Beauty and the Breast: The Cultural Context of Breastfeeding in the United States,” and “A Time to Wean: The Hominid Blueprint for a Natural Age of Weaning in Modern Human Populations.”